


Before I Wake

by JackOfNone



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Caning, F/F, Guro, Hurt/Comfort, Masochism, Other, Sadism, Temporary Character Death, Vore, Xenophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:21:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23603728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackOfNone/pseuds/JackOfNone
Summary: Life and death are a cycle, but not like this.
Relationships: The Hunter/Imposter Iosefka, The Hunter/Plain Doll, The Hunter/Vicar Amelia
Comments: 3
Kudos: 35
Collections: Smut 4 Smut 2020





	Before I Wake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fayharley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fayharley/gifts).



As it turns out, dying is all too easy, even for a hunter. 

The beast had been a woman once -- less than an hour ago, all told, though the gulf between the slight figure bent over her rosary and the monster whose claws now pinned her to the hallowed ground seemed impossible for a mere few minutes transformation. The beast's fur was like snowfall in the city of the Hunter's birth -- white polluted with unwholesome shades of grey and black and brown -- and her antlered head was long and lethal, mostly mouth with far, far more needle-like teeth than any natural animal would ever need. Her plain white shift hung in rags around her head and neck, obscuring her eyes if she even still possessed them, but she did not need to see to seek a Hunter, that much was plain. 

The beast's nose, easily the size of the hunter's head by itself, leaned down to snuffle at her prey -- a long and languid sniff, as though savoring the stench of blood like a rich man savors the aroma of a fine wine. Her breath was fever-hot and ragged against the Hunter's face, smelling of rotten meat and flowers; struggle as she might, the creature's size and strength was far greater. Her saw-cleaver lay uselessly knocked from her hand in one corner of the ruined church; her flintlock had been reduced to so many splinters beneath the monster's claw. Her ribs ached from the impact. She could still breathe, but for how long that would hold true the Hunter could not say. 

The creature's limbs were long and spindly, and arranged like a man's instead of a beast's with legs that bent forwards at the knee; her movements were thus strangely, frighteningly human, moreso than any other beast that the Hunter had faced thus far -- a strange parody of humanity, gruesome in its malice when combined with the doglike face that held no semblance of the woman she had once been. 

The long, too long maw cracked open with an earth-shaking sigh, and the beast's blood-red tongue slid out from between her rows of monstrous teeth. Her claw lifted -- it mattered little, as the Hunter was quite certain her leg was shattered below the knee and would not hold her weight no matter how many vials of blood she flushed into her open veins to dull the pain -- and then the beast's wolf-like head dipped so close to her that the Hunter could have touched the grimy fur, if she had the strength. The mouth was longer than she was tall, teeth arranged in a solid line all the way back to her cheek, and all of them long and sharp. Even a dog had back teeth to chew its meat; this monster was all killing, no eating. 

The clammy nose nudged into her stomach, just beneath her ribs and just hard enough to show the creature's strength. The beast could crush her if she chose, but she seemed to want instead to toy with her prey, like a cat with a mouse -- although the Hunter had never seen a cat quite as cruel as a human, and the Beasts had all been human once. 

Tongue lolling from her mouth, the beast dragged her nose downward, sniffing and pinning the Hunter's hips to the ground. She made an inhuman, chuffing sort of noise, loud as a cannon-shot given her size, and somehow the Hunter was certain that the beast was laughing at her. The long tongue slapped wetly against her splayed thigh, the movement sending a jolt of pain through her shattered leg. Summoning the final ounce of her strength, the Hunter reached up and seized a handful of greasy white fur, just above the creature's curled lips. 

"Get off me, beast," she hissed, pulling with all her strength -- what she was trying to accomplish, she had no idea. Maybe she just wanted to see if she could make the creature wince a bit before she bit her in twain. 

Instead, the beast merely made that chuffing laugh again, and drew her dripping tongue between the Hunter's legs in one agonizingly long lick. 

The Hunter gasped, groaning deep in her throat. Even lying nearly broken and staring death in the face, she could feel the monster's rough tongue through the thick cloth of her trousers in an aching grind. Ever since she was a girl, fighting and the smell of blood had made her wet; it had been a secret she kept close to her, something to drive her hunting instinct, but it was as though this beast had sniffed out her deepest flaw and mocked her with it, as though she still had a human being's instinct for wickedness and a vicar's urge to condemn sin. 

Desperately, the Hunter clawed at the beast's face, but that only seemed to excite or amuse her more. She curled her tongue underneath the Hunter's broken body, arcing her hips up into the undulating curve of wet muscle; legs forced wide by the breadth of it, trousers damp with the beast's salivating and the sticky blood that had pooled beneath her, it was as though the beast had her massive tongue directly on the folds of her cunt now, and by the gods the drag of every soft bump against her agitated clit made her shiver involuntarily. 

She was going to die, and here she was getting off on it -- filled with rage and too battered to move, she was going to lose this fight and she was going to like it. 

The beast hitched her tongue up, sliding the Hunter into her mouth up to the waist. The pressure on her pulped leg made the Hunter scream, her grip loosening on the beast's fur; the interior of her mouth was warm and wet and carried the same strange, otherworldly scent -- rotting meat and flowers and blood, somehow strange but not stomach-churning as one might expect it to be. Teeth, each as long as her forearm, pressed against her arched belly, piercing the leather of her waistcoat and starting to prick her skin. Below the waist everything was moist and hot, like being immersed in a warm bath. The monster's breath made the Hunter's head swim, and her tongue lapped at the curve of her arse and thighs, slick and obscene. 

The Hunter gasped, and the too-deep breath thrust her vulnerable flesh upward, onto the monster's teeth. They broke skin as easily as they pierced hard leather, fiery pinpoints of pain like starlight in a night-time sky of agony. She looked down to see her blood smeared on the monster's teeth, trickling from fresh holes in her belly, seeping into her drenched garb. 

The beast tilted her head skyward, and the Hunter slid further down into her open maw, wet and waiting and willing. Inch by inch, her feet slid obscenely deep into the creature's throat, tight around her broken leg. The tip of the beast's tongue curled up to cradle her head, lolling back in defeat; the Hunter's entire body was slowly but surely swallowed up into a prison of flesh and blood, a suffocating blanket pressing in on all sides. 

The last thing she heard before the massive jaws snapped shut was the bone-deep thrum of the beast's racing, erratic heart. 

* * * 

The end was always different -- the slow weakening of blood loss or the sudden crunch of a monster's jaws with the Hunter's body trapped between her teeth -- but the awakening was always the same. The clouds just barely hiding distant, massive pillars that seemed to hold up the sky; the flowers gently waving in the breeze; the wordless excited chattering of the messengers and the ragged breathing of Gehrmann, talking nonsense and terror in his sleep. 

The Hunter always woke in the Dream whole and unbloodied, and she was there to receive her. 

She had no name. Not a name that had been abandoned, like the Hunter's, nor a name that had been forgotten, like the woman who had become the white-furred beast of the church -- she was merely described by the word that encompassed both her form and her function: the doll. 

Perhaps it was the passionate violence of her failure that had done it, but this was the first time the Hunter had ever arrived in the Dream on her back. Usually, she was at least standing, as though she had nodded off leaning against a wall. The doll was already kneeling by her side, dress neatly folded beneath her knees. 

No matter what, the Hunter always awoke in the Dream whole and unbloodied, but the doll always seemed to know where she had been injured. Now, her delicate porcelain hands were gently undoing the buttons of her leather waistcoat and shirt, one at a time. Even her clothes were clean and un-torn. 

The Hunter sighed, and her shirt fell open to her sides at the movement of her chest, exposing a line of smooth, unbroken skin below the wrappings on her chest to brace her ribs against breaks. The doll's fingertips were cool where the memory of the beast's teeth was burning, calm where the waking world had boiled with rage. 

Her breathing slowed, as though she were falling asleep. 

"Good hunter," the doll said. Her voice, like always, was quiet and gentle. Nothing about the doll ever changed, save that she grew more active each time the Hunter returned. "Do you wish to rest?" 

"I can't rest." Her own voice sounded rough to her now, too rough to be talking to the gentle doll with her glassy skin, joints painted smooth, and voice like the softest touch of a downy feather drifting off one's pillow in the night. "No time. The whole city's crawling with beasts, now." 

"Time has no meaning here," the doll said. Her fingers clicked as they toyed at her belt, then slid beneath the fabric of her trousers, into her smallclothes to brush against the curve of her cunt. 

How long had it been since she had felt herself grow wet between the legs without violence -- without imagining the crack of a jaw under her fist at least, to make her climax come? 

"Good hunter," the doll said, raising her other hand to stroke the Hunter's hair, her fingers separating the strands into thin ribbons. The pad of the doll's index finger brushed the Hunter's clit -- not warm and yielding like human flesh, but cool and smooth like the finest porcelain. The Hunter arched her back towards the doll, letting a moan of pleasure spill from her lips. Gehrmann slept soundly, and would never waken. There was no one in the garden to see them. 

Distantly, the Hunter wondered...of all the things to make her feel more human, it was this -- it was <i>her</i>, the obliging doll who welcomed her back whole no matter how gruesomely she failed in the waking world. 

No human at all, she was the furthest thing from the beasts raging through Yharnam -- through the Hunter's veins -- through the beating heart of all mankind. 

* * *

Despite the doctor's insistence, the Hunter had sent the few remaining humans she'd found to Oedon Chapel instead -- it was larger inside than the doctor's little office, flooded with the scent of beast-repelling incense, and besides, she liked the strange decrepit fellow who kept the place and had the sneaking suspicion that what the survivors needed wasn't a doctor's care but a friendly spot of conversation -- something Church doctors, whatever their good intentions, had never been particularly skilled at. 

Still, the doctor seemed kind-hearted enough, especially in a city filled near to bursting with maddened beasts. So, when the Hunter discovered there was a hidden back door to Iosefka's little clinic that opened onto the forest, she investigated. It would be dreadful if someone had hurt the poor woman, one of the few untainted souls left within the walls. The passage beyond the trap door was dark, dingy, and seemed to be in a state of some disrepair -- not unlike the rest of Yharnam, perhaps, but it had a peculiar sort of unwholesome wildness to it that suggested to the Hunter that it had not been used in some time. In turn, that meant the poor doctor -- by all accounts a gentle soul, unused to combat and fully unsuited to facing down the beasts of the forest -- perhaps had a back door into her clinic of which she was unaware. A back door that could easily let in all manner of unspeakable evils from the dark forest outside Yharnam's walls, and the ruins of that accursed university beyond it. 

The Hunter made it to the clinic unharmed, though wet with strange blood. Her appearance must have been terrifying to most, but the Hunter was long past caring or even thinking of such things. The things in the corridor were human-shaped, though all beasts were, and they bled a thin grey slurry that sparkled in the moonlight but looked cloudy and dirty by any other light. The Hunter found she no longer had to carry a torch to find her way through the darkness, an alarming level of clarity that was more bestial than human. 

What bothered her the most about those beasts was their smooth flesh, more like that of a snake or a frog than wild wolfish fur. It made her shudder to think of touching it, and yet she had the urge to plunge her hands into the soft. melting flesh of the creature's burst head that she had to tamp down upon, lest she act upon it. 

Iosefka was surprised to see her, and seemed to be expecting trouble of some kind. She confronted the Hunter armed with only a walking stick -- it would have been of little use against near anything outside, and barely registered as a weapon to the Hunter's eye. She looked much like the Hunter had expected: a small woman, lean from a life of scholarly pursuits, her grey-brown hair pulled back from her face. She was dressed all in white, with a linen apron to keep her garments from being spattered with the blood of her trade. Right now, she smelled like the little vial she'd given the Hunter through the door what felt like a lifetime ago. 

Iosefka lowered her cane once she recognized her and, to her immense shock, the doctor flung herself into the Hunter's arms. 

"Oh, hunter," she said, her voice a sigh. The startled Hunter dropped her cleaver in lieu of sheathing it and took a deep breath. "I had thought you dead, or worse. Praise the gods that you still live." The Hunter rested one hand upon Iosefka's shoulder awkwardly. She smelled of her own blood and laudunum and iodine. 

It felt so strange, so good to be welcomed with open arms, to be met with relief and not fear, that the Hunter pushed some nagging thought from the back of her mind. 

"I...I found a back-door," the Hunter stammered. "Long out of use. Feared you might be in danger." Iosefka kissed the side of the Hunter's jaw, right above the scarf she'd wrapped about her throat to keep out the chill of the night air. Of course, the Hunter thought, a doctor would have to quarantine herself from the rest of the city, her only company the maddened patients of her ward. Of course she would want for human company. Of course, she was charmed by her warrior's resolve to protect the innocent. 

It made such sweet, compelling sense that Iosefka had the Hunter perched upon the edge of her operating table with the doctor between her legs that she started to wonder why Iosefka smelled of her OWN blood when she had not a scratch on her. 

Iosefka -- or the woman who occupied Iosefka's clinic -- caught the Hunter's eyes, and must have read suspicion there. She drew back, very slightly; her hand that was not occupied with the Hunter's skirts jerked suddenly, and the Hunter heard the sound of breaking glass and the tell-tale scent of valerian flower and ozone. 

Numbing mist -- and by the foul stench of it, she must have cracked an entire vial upon the floor. The Hunter lifted her arm to shove Iosefka off her, but found her arm would not obey her fully. It was all she could do to curl her hand into a fist to flail, ineffectually, at the doctor's frail-seeming form, barely enough to ruffle her hair. With surprising strength the smaller woman hooked her arms around the Hunter's hips and shoved her roughly up onto the surgeon's table, where she fell onto her back like a kitten grabbed in its mothers mouth. 

Why wasn't the doctor affected? Though her movements were slow and sluggish, the Hunter could still FEEL. The other woman's hands were ungloved and her skin was cold and clammy; her hands were shaking as though from extreme excitement as she unhooked the Hunter's belt, yanked it from her, fairly tore her skirts from her until she was nude below the waist. The Hunter kicked feebly, rage building like arousal in the pit of her stomach, fierce and ineffectual with nowhere to express itself. 

The doctor's cold, clammy hand pulled away, and the Hunter could see traces of strange tendrils retreating into her sleeve, leaving translucent swipes of ichor across her hands. 

Not just a Church doctor -- something darker. Stranger. Something that could breathe numbing mist and not be slowed, something that clawed at the edge of the Hunter's mind, begging entry. 

The doctor -- whom the Hunter could not stop thinking of as Iosefka, even if the women who had once held that name was now likely dead -- shoved her onto her stomach, her body folding over the edge of the table so she was bent at the waist over it. Before going out, this time, the Hunter had swapped her trousers for a voluminous skirt that hid her footwork; another terrible choice, she contemplated, as the doctor pulled her skirt up over her hips, exposing her drawers and her up-tilted arse like a schoolgirl about to get a switching. The Hunter tried to kick, tried to fight, but it was somehow all she could do to grab the edge of the dissection table and keep herself upright. 

"You're mad," the Hunter hissed, between her clenched teeth. 

"Possibly. Medically speaking, at least," Iosefka said, with a smirk in her voice. She leaned over the Hunter, hand pressed into the small of her back. The Hunter could see the glint of something metal in the other woman's hand -- a syringe? A scalpel? Iosefka brushed the Hunter's hair away from the back of her neck and the Hunter felt the cold edge of a knife playing right across the arc of her spine, below her hairline. A gentle brush, not yet deep enough to cut -- testing the waters, perhaps. The effects of the numbing mist, taking away her command over her limbs, somehow threw every other sensation into sharp relief. Iosefka was close to her now, pressing up against her, and the Hunter could feel her labored breath through her fighting leathers. 

Iosefka leaned close, by the Hunter's ear, eyelids fluttering as she sniffed her matted locks as though she had sensed the presence of a fine perfume. 

"I'd wanted a hunter to work on for quite some time," Iosefka whispered, close enough to the Hunter's ear that it made her shiver involuntarily, a strange sensation in her half-paralyzed state. The edge of what must be a scalpel reappeared, pressing just behind the Hunter's ear -- teasing, sliding sensuously down the Hunter's neck. This time, Iosefka cut deep enough to draw blood -- a thin, stinging line of red springing up in the wake of her scalpel. "And what a specimen you are. Ah! I can smell it on you." Another ragged drawing-in of breath, and another stinging line down the curve of the Hunter's spine. "That pale moonlight scent. How I've longed for a sample of blood that smelled like that." Iosefka's fingers played through the thin cuts on the back of the Hunter's neck, dipping into the blood there and smearing it around on her naked flesh like fresh ink. The doctor's thigh pressed in between her legs, grinding up against her through the cursedly thin linen of her underclothes. 

"Monster," the Hunter spat. Iosefka laughed lightly. "Beast." 

"Beast?" Iosefka's warm body retreated, anger prickling in her voice. The Hunter tried to get her feet under her, boots sliding on the slick floor, toes connecting with a gore-splattered drain. 

And then, Iosefka struck. 

Her aim was unerring, with a surgeon's precision -- right between her legs, along the cleft of her cunt with a wet snap that made her legs jerk like being hit with a bolt of lightning. The taut linen, wet with sweat and slick and blood and gods knew what else she'd waded through on this endless night, only barely shielded the tender flesh beneath from the wicked force of the cane. Maybe it was the effect of the woman's drug, but the Hunter could not suppress a ragged cry of pain and raw emotion at the intimate strike. 

"I'll not tolerate such talk from a hunter," the doctor hissed. "You who drown yourselves so willingly in the ecstasy of blood. You who --" and here she prodded, hard, with the tip of her cane into the hollow of the Hunter's cunt, "-- wet your skirts at the first sign of death and suffering." With a harsh, rough jerk Iosefka pulled the Hunter's drawers to her knees, exposing her entire lower half with her skirt still pulled up over her waist. "Beast indeed. Hah!" 

Another strike, just as expertly aimed, landed right across the back of the Hunter's thighs, just the edge of it snapping across her bared, slickened folds. The strike might have drawn blood upon her thighs -- at the very least she would have red-purple stripe there in a moment or two, when the blood beneath her skin had time to bubble nearer to the surface. The impact hummed deep in her core, making her shriek and moan in equal measure. 

Iosefka let her cane fall again, with a derisive laugh. Pain shot through the Hunter's cunt -- a fiery, intense pain that seemed to stab deep into her belly like an impaling sword without ever drawing blood. Her toes flexed in her boots, and her fingernails dug into the soft wood of the surgery table. Her eyelids fluttered. Was she going to pass out? 

Wildly, the Hunter remembered that the Church -- and by her garb this woman who had usurped Iosefka's name was from the Church -- had specialized in the use of a kind of trick weapon that resembled a simple walking stick, but with a flick of the wrist could become a line of razors, a whip to flay corrupted flesh from bone with the ease of a knife through warm butter. This imposter's cane had been of a fine make, its handle covered with raised carvings, any one of which could be the mechanism's trigger. The doctor had only to move her fingers just so, and the Hunter would be sliced in two and spill her guts upon the floor. 

That fear -- death at the hands of another human, not a frenzied beast or monster of the Yharnam night -- froze her in place more than the doctor's numbing drugs as she struck her again, again. Without giving her a fraction of a moment's rest between strikes Iosefka laid blow after blow on her open, aching cunt in agonizing succession, criss-crossing her flesh with vivid bright red lines of agony that she could feel, if not turn her head to see. And it wasn't as though the woman was lying for her insults either -- the attention, the pain itself was making her wet, drawing angry and needy cries from her throat as though forced out by the crack of the cane across her clit. And here she could do nothing -- not fight, not fuck. Only lie bent at the waist over a mad-woman's medical tableaux and wait for the next blow to fall and drive her that much more mad. 

Eventually the woman decided she had punished the Hunter for her insolence enough, perhaps, and levered her abused bottom half up onto the table. The wood was hard and unfinished beneath her over-sensitive arse -- clearly not made for the comfort of the doctor's patients, who anyway would likely be beyond caring soon enough. Hard leather cuffs clacked onto her wrists, and the laces of her clothing fell to the doctor's knife. The imposter was leaning over her, face flushed, hand trembling with excitement so greatly that, in her haste to undress her like a corpse laid out on a morgue slab, she accidentally nicked the skin of her heaving belly. 

The drug crawled had crawled its way up the Hunter's throat; in addition to her extremities, she now found her tongue would not obey her either, refusing to spit the insults she wanted. She lay, mute and unwillingly submissive. 

Iosefka's fingers grazed across her abused cunt, swollen and sensitive to the slightest touch. If she'd had the ability, the Hunter would have screamed as the doctor forced three fingers inside her, prying her open for inspection, as her thumb lazily stroked her throbbing clit. Numb muscles in the Hunter's torso twisted and jerked as the doctor began to pull a climax from her body like a rotten tooth. 

"Iosefka barely lasted a moment," the church doctor mused, putting the scalpal to the Hunter's navel. "Let's see if we can test your Hunter's nerve." 

\--

"The thing is, dying...it's so easy. Too easy. And it was even worse with the doctor, because I couldn't even fight. And the worst part about it is...I just walked right into her lair. Because she was happy to see me." The Hunter sighed. "No one's ever happy to see a hunter." 

The doll, who would never know death, cocked her head slightly to the side. The Hunter had laid herself down in a field of tiny flowers, little white blossoms that waved slightly without wind. Her head nestled perfectly into the doll's lap, as though it were made that way -- although the Hunter knew that there had been many before her who had come to the Dream and perhaps laid their heads down in the doll's lap just like she did now. 

Alone together under the paper-thin moon and dome-like muted sky, the Hunter had slowly stripped away layer after layer of her clothing until she was wearing nothing at all. The doll had expressed interest in what she looked like under her hunter's garb, and a simple, innocent little request from her might as well have been a queen's command, even though it had been years since anyone had last seen her naked. The doll laid her cool hands upon the hollow of the Hunter's collarbone, just above where her breasts began; the skin there, like much of her body, was criss-crossed with old blade-marks and patches of pale scar tissue where fire and vitriol had eaten the surface away. There were so many scars, and yet fewer than there ought to be -- the Hunter found that any blow that sent her back to the Dream and the doll's waiting arms never left a mark. There was not even a thin line where the doctor's scalpel had split her open just below the ribs and bared her deepest insides to the open air. The doll, for her part, stayed clothed and made no move to undress, but the Hunter did not mind. After all, she was all artificial, and her dress and her bonnet were as much a part of her as body beneath. 

The doll had no heartbeat or pulse, but when the Hunter closed her eyes she fancied she could hear blood flowing inside her in any case -- not the searing, scarlet that drove men into frenzy, but something calm and pale as a slow river lit by moonlight. 

"I am," the doll said. "And I will welcome you home as many times as it takes, dear hunter." 

The Hunter listened to the pounding of her own heart for a moment, her hands drifting over her scarred skin to the porcelain hand of the doll, holding it gently. 

"As long as it takes for what?" the Hunter asked. 

If the doll had an answer besides her gentle, enigmatic smile, the Hunter did not hear it, or did not care to.

Here in the Dream, in the doll's arms beneath the wide-eyed moon, she could rest...and let the grim secrets of Yharnam, of the Hunters, of the sky above and the sea below, rest with her.


End file.
